Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Suffering in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
This is really part two of one long sermon. In the prior session I began by saying that instead of offering a proof text or simply expounding one Scripture I would lay out five pillars on which to build a kind of stable way of thinking about suffering and disaster and evil. We’ve already looked at three.
First, we looked at insights from the beginning of the Bible storyline: in particular, creation and fall. Second, we looked insights from the end of the Bible storyline: in particular, a heaven to be gained and a hell to be shunned (and, therefore, an eternal perspective that must govern everything) and then tying that into inaugural eschatology, which dominates so much of the New Testament.
Third, we looked at some insights from the place of innocent suffering, where we thought through rather briefly the argument of the book of Job. I want to give two more pillars and then, in conclusion, I’ll try to bring to bear some pastoral reflections.
4. Insights from the mystery of providence.
This is one of the most difficult areas to think through theologically, and yet it is very important for us to come to grips with some sort of stable view on these matters.
Let me begin with two propositions, both of which I would be prepared to defend at great length. In fact, I’m only going to defend them rather briefly, but I would be prepared to defend them at great length. These two propositions, I hold, are biblically mandated. They are non-negotiable for thoughtful Christians.
A. God is utterly sovereign, but his sovereignty never functions to mitigate human responsibility.
B. Human beings are morally responsible creatures, but their moral responsibility never functions to make God absolutely contingent.
By this, I mean that human beings choose to believe and disbelieve, to obey and disobey, and to reject and accept; these things are morally significant actions in the Scripture. However, their moral responsibility never functions to make God secondary, absolutely contingent, dependent upon us in some way, or merely a responder.
Now I would be prepared to argue at length that those propositions can be defended in text after text after text after text. The trick is.… How do you put them together? The fact that they belong together is sometimes called, in philosophical theology, compatibilism, which is merely the assertion that both of these propositions are mutually compatible. That’s all it is.
Compatibilism doesn’t pretend that it can show exactly how they are compatible. I’ll come to the mystery element in all of this in due course. It merely shows that you can make a good case, from biblical evidence and broader considerations as well, for showing that there is nothing about these two propositions that makes them necessarily incompatible. In other words, it acknowledges how much we don’t know, but it argues that we can know enough to believe both propositions without committing intellectual hara-kiri.
Be patient with me; this seems like a long way from suffering, but you’ll see in a few moments that it’s not. So let me turn, now, to three passages in Scripture (of many that could be chosen) where these two propositions are either articulated or exemplified or presupposed and worked out in the theology of the text.
First, Genesis 50:19–20. There’s a similar passage in Genesis 45, but we’ll focus on this one. At this point, the old man has died. Joseph’s brothers approach him, afraid that perhaps he will take the departure of the father as a signal that he’s now free to wreak revenge upon the brothers for having sold him into slavery so many decades earlier. So they approach him and give a whole line (which may or may not be true even) that their father wanted him to treat them with respect.
Joseph is transparently very hurt by all of this, but what he tells them is this: “You intended what you did for evil, but God intended it for good.” Now I know there are different ways that you can translate that and so forth, but at the heart of the text is a rather remarkable way of phrasing things, isn’t it?
It’s helpful to see what the text does not say. It does not say, “God’s intention had been to send me down to Egypt in an air-conditioned, chauffeur-driven limousine. Unfortunately, you chaps mucked up his plan. As a result, I went down there as a two-bit slave.” That’s not what the text says.
Nor does it say, “You fellows intended to send me into slavery and do me a great deal of harm, and that day, God wasn’t paying much attention, so that’s what happened. But he’s such a good chess player that after the fact, he came in and sorted it all out. So although you meant me a lot of misery, he’s so good in the moves he makes that he came along after the fact and, eventually, I became prime minister of Egypt.” The text doesn’t say that either.
Rather, in one and the same event, we’re told, God intended it for good and you intended it for evil. God’s sovereignty is preserved and so also is human responsibility. The fact that God was doing something in this miserable event … something good in this miserable event … does not in any sense minimize the accountability of the brothers for the evil that they were doing. The fact that they are morally accountable for what they were doing does not in any sense mean that God is somehow withdrawn from the situation.
Second, Isaiah 10:5 and following. This is typical of many passages in the prophets. This one is chosen rather arbitrarily. God addresses the Assyrians through the prophet, and what God says is this: “Woe to the Assyrian, the rod of my anger, in whose hand is the club of my wrath! I send him against a godless nation, I dispatch him against a people who anger me …” Now the people to whom God is sending the Assyrians is, in fact, the covenant people themselves, for all of their godlessness and sin.
“… I dispatch him against a people who anger me, to seize loot and snatch plunder, and to trample them down like mud in the streets. But this is not what he intends, this is not what he has in mind; his purpose is to destroy, to put an end to many nations. ‘Are not my commanders all kings?’ he says.” Even his officers are royalty.
“ ‘Has not Calno fared like Carchemish? Is not Hamath like Arpad, and Samaria like Damascus?’ ” All these cities that I’ve already wiped out; I can take care of them all. A few more cities? Samaria is no better than Damascus. If I can take care of Damascus, then I can take care of Samaria. And so forth.
“As my hand seized the kingdoms of the idols, kingdoms whose images excelled those of Jerusalem and Samaria …” Which shows how much he understands about the religion of Jerusalem and Samaria. “ ‘… shall I not deal with Jerusalem and her images as I dealt with Samaria and her idols?’ When the Lord has finished all his work …”
That is, all his work in using Assyria to chasten his own people. “… against Mount Zion and Jerusalem, he will say, ‘I will punish the king of Assyria for the willful pride of his heart and the haughty look in his eyes. For he says: “By the strength of my hand I have done this, and by my wisdom, because I have understanding. I removed the boundaries of nations, I plundered their treasures; like a mighty one I subdued their kings.
As one reaches into a nest, so my hand reached for the wealth of the nations; as men gather abandoned eggs, so I gathered all the countries; not one flapped a wing, or opened its mouth to chirp.” ’ ” This is entirely realistic. The Assyrians were wont, as other sources have shown us, to boast about being oppressors.
God says, “Does the ax raise itself above him who swings it, or the saw boast against the one who uses it?” God is using Assyria as if it’s nothing more than a tool, thank you very much. “Therefore, the Lord, the Lord Almighty, will send a wasting disease upon his sturdy warriors; under his pomp a fire will be kindled like a blazing flame.” Now stick that in your theological pipe and smoke it!
If your brain hurts with the first passage, then it’s really going to hurt on this one. In these war maneuvers, God is actually sending Assyria; he’s treating Assyria like a tool. This is God’s action. It’s the same sort of thing as said later with respect to Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians as well, precisely so that Jerusalem understands that when Nebuchadnezzar comes in, it’s not because God wasn’t strong enough. In fact, it was God’s doing.
But that does not mean that the Assyrians (or later, the Babylonians), because they’ve been tools in the Lord’s hand, are, therefore, somehow exempt from any responsibility. They’re still held accountable and get clobbered by God, in turn, for what they did.
Third, Acts 4:24–28. There are dozens and dozens of these in Scripture, but it seems to me that this is perhaps the most dramatic passage of all. Here, the first whiff of persecution has broken out against the church. Peter and John return, we’re told, to their own people (to the Christians who have gathered).
The instant response of the Christians is to pray, and they do so in the words of Psalm 2. They begin, “Sovereign Lord, you made the heavens and the earth and the sea,” and so forth. Historically, it is regularly the case that when the church is going through persecution, they begin by confessing God’s sovereignty. Just ask Christians in the Southern Sudan.
I’m heavily invested in some movements in Central and Eastern Europe, and a year and a half ago, I met the bishop of the Lutheran Church of Lithuania. He had been arrested under the Communists about 600 times. He couldn’t remember how many with torture. The first instinct of such people is to respond by confessing the sovereignty of God. So also here.
“You made the heavens and the earth and the sea, and everything in them. You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David: ‘Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the Lord and against his anointed one,’ ” against his mashiyach. In other words, even this outbreak of barbarity and persecution that is beginning to unwind in front of us is already seen in Scripture.
Then these two verses: 27 and 28. On one hand, “Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed.” Verse 28: “They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen.”
Now suppose for a moment that we ripped verse 27 out and just kept verse 28. All the events that go up to the cross, then, are God’s own doing. We don’t worry about any human agents or their responsibility or otherwise. Yes, they did stuff, but God was working sovereignly and so it worked out that way.
After all, don’t you have to defend God’s sovereignty in bringing Christ to the cross? I mean, otherwise, the cross becomes an accident in the flow of history, and how do you square that with all of the antecedent Scriptures that have Christ as the Passover Lamb and the Great Sacrifice of Yom Kippur? Or all the Scriptures that point typologically ahead to Christ as the Great Temple or Christ as the Great High Priest or the like. It’s all irrelevant.
But if you believe that God is sovereign and that he brings it all to pass, then, of course, the cross is in the mind and plan of God. Isn’t that what the Apocalypse says? In God’s mind, Christ is crucified since before the foundation of the earth. So I guess that means that Pilate and Herod are all excused, aren’t they? Nope. Verse 27 is still there. God’s sovereignty in bringing about the events of the cross does not mitigate one iota all of the offenses that brought Christ there. Pilate’s washing of his hands does not make him clean.
On the other hand, if you emphasize verse 27 and lose verse 28, then Christ goes to the cross, finally, because of the cheap political expediency in the first century in a minor Near Eastern country. That’s it. In which case, what you’ve lost is the whole Bible storyline. Are we to think that Pilate, the rulers of the Jews, and Herod decided to get rid of Jesus, and suddenly God thought, “Well, if they’re going to do that, boy, I have a really good idea! I’ll trick them; I’ll use this nasty thing that they brought about to actually save people instead”?
As if God hadn’t thought of it before, but he’s such a good chess player that he manages to come in after the fact and clean up the mess. Thus the trigger for the cross of Christ turns out to be not the eternal plan of God but the evil of wicked people and God is a master chess player. None of that will stand; it’s not stable.
What I want to argue is that these two propositions have to be believed by any thinking Christian or else, sooner or later, what you destroy is the cross. Despite the fact that there are some very well intentioned Christians that try to avoid compatibilism, as far as I can see, you can’t duck it. At the end of the day, there’s just too much turning on it. You have to believe both of those propositions.
But that does not mean that we can explain exactly how they fit together. Here, historically, there have been different ways of trying to fit them together. I’m not going to take you through those debates; I don’t have time. They turn, in part, on different ways of defining freedom and will and so forth. They’re very important issues, but I’m not going to deal with them here. What I will say, however, is this: once you’ve established those two poles as both being true, then it seems to me that there are a couple of other steps that need to be taken.
Sooner or later, it is important to see that those two poles (both of those propositions, which are both true and are both needing to be confessed) are, in some ways, related to what the Bible says about God throughout the whole Bible, because, on the one hand, the Bible presents God as being sovereign (utterly in control) and transcendent (above the whole created order; he makes the whole thing, so he’s above space and time and matter). He’s transcendent, and he’s sovereign. On the other hand, God is personal and interactive.
The trouble is that all that I know of personal interaction, in my normal existence, involves finitude. I ask my wife how she’s doing; she asks what I’m working on, what time we’re going to go to shops together, did I remember to get the car greased, and whatever. It’s all interactive, but it’s all finitude. God certainly presents himself as the one who is interacting, as a person, with persons in Scripture. That’s going on all the time, isn’t it?
But if you take those passages and absolutize them and forget all the passages that speak of his transcendence, of his sovereignty, of his turning the heart of the king anywhere he wants, of his knowing all our thoughts before we even think them, of his utter sovereignty … not a sparrow falls from the heavens without his sanction … then you have a very personable God, no doubt, but he’s just not very big.
Instead, if you emphasize all the passages that emphasize God’s sovereignty and his transcendence, and then forget or overlook all of the passages that have him interacting with his own image bearers, then you have a God that is awesome and sovereign and transcendent and powerful, but it’s just very difficult to understand how he can be exempted from being charged with evil. Or, he’s so far removed that he becomes a deist God. He’s not a theistic God at all.
That means that over the course of time … as Christians have tried to put these things together, to be faithful to Scripture, to see that compatibilism is taught there … they have realized, although it’s been configured in a variety of ways, that God is so big that we don’t have all of the answers about how all of these things are put together.
God, transcendent above time and space? I scarcely know what time is. I don’t have a clue what it means to be above time. I’ve read lots and lots of books on it. I think I can rule out certain conceptions, but I really don’t know what it means. What I do know is that God presents himself as foreordaining and predestining. Those are biblical words, and they involve sequence and time, whether we like it or not.
Then we affirm, at the same time, that because God existed before anything else existed, he is above and transcendent with respect to all that is in the created order. Does your brain hurt? That’s why, in the course of time, Christians, in affirming God’s sovereignty, have been forced, sooner or later, to say things like this:
“God stands utterly sovereign over all that takes place, but he stands asymmetrically behind good and evil. He stands behind good and evil in the sense that he is sovereign over the whole lot, but he doesn’t stand behind good and evil in exactly the same way. He stands behind evil, such that the evil itself is always directly attributable to secondary causalities. He stands behind good in such a way that the good is always directly attributable to him.”
If you want to say, “Boy, that sounds a bit too convenient for God,” I will say, “That’s the only God there is. Get used to it.” Now there are a lot more philosophical things to say and all kinds of theological footnotes to put in, but at the end of the day, that really is the case. God is presented as not only sovereign and personal but also as unfailingly good, immaculately good, and inevitably good. He is never not good.
But in this fallen and broken world in which he operates, then he brings good out of evil. He remains still the God who sends Assyria or Babylon to wipe out a nation, brings disaster and judgments, and in the judgments is also displaying his goodness in all kinds of merciful ways. Nothing ever happens outside the outermost bounds of his sovereignty. Not a thing. And yet he’s still a God of goodness and grace so that all the goodness and gracious things that happen in this world are directly attributed to him.
Don’t we Christians learn to think in those terms? Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling because God has done his bit, and now it’s all up to you. Or did I get that wrong? No, no. “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, because it is God working in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.”
Now then, what does this have to do with what we’re supposed to be talking about? Granted that there is some mystery, some deep unknowns in the very person, reality, and existence of God when you start thinking about these things, then pastorally and exegetically, the most important move that you can make at that point is this:
You will allow God’s sovereignty, and all the passages related to God’s sovereignty, to function in your life and understanding and church only in the ways that they function in Scripture, and you will allow all the texts that speak of human responsibility (choices, belief, disbelief, and all the rest) to function in your life, in your theology, and in your church only in the way in which they function in Scripture.
Because otherwise, unwittingly, what you might begin to do is try to make one side function in some such way or other that it begins to destroy the other side. You start drawing inferences from the one side that actually seem so logical and coherent on paper until you suddenly take another look, and you’ve started destroying the other given. You can’t let them function in such a way that the givens are destroyed, from one side or the other. You can’t do that.
So what do we infer from Scripture that God is sovereign? What do the Scriptures infer from the truth of God’s sovereignty? Do the Scriptures infer that God is sovereign so whatever you do, you’re not responsible for it because, at the end of the day, God moves you around like a tool, like a pawn on a chessboard? Is there any inference along those lines? Not one.
But there are lots of inferences that God is utterly sovereign. Therefore, he can be trusted. Therefore, all things work together for the good for those who are the called of God, according to his purpose. Therefore, at the end he’ll bring glory and justice will be done and be seen to be done. His purposes are vastly greater than ours and sometimes we’re not going to understand. All those sorts of inferences are drawn again and again in Scripture, aren’t they?
What do you infer from the countless texts that picture human beings choosing? “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. Choose you this day whom you will.” What are we to infer from that? Therefore, God has done his bit, and it’s all up to us? Dear ol’ God, now, has his hands tied because it all depends on how we choose? Those inferences simply aren’t drawn in Scripture.
Rather, the inferences are, therefore: choose aright, understand that you’re held to account before God for the choices and decisions you make, and understand that if you make wise ones, it is God working in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure. Therefore, be grateful. You submit yourself under the mighty hand of God.
Once that large view of God is in place, you’re approaching very close to what is the sort of undergirding presupposition behind the endless books you find written by the Puritans, for example, on the mystery of providence. Mystery, now, not in the New Testament sense of mustÈrion (that’s not the idea) nor in the literary sense of a whodunit.
Rather, it is that which is beyond our capacity to domesticate. It is beyond our capacity to understand and articulate fully. There are some things about God that remain unknown. He’s bigger than we are. It shouldn’t be too surprising that there are things about God that we don’t understand.
How, then, does the mystery of providence work out in our lives when a wheel comes off? It doesn’t mean that we won’t ever wrestle with God, but we’ll find ourselves wrestling in the same sorts of categories as a Job, who can cry, in the midst of his anguish and confusion, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.”
It’s within that framework, it seems to me, that there are a whole lot of subcategories to this question of suffering that need to be thought through. I will just mention a few of them quickly. Here we could easily spend another lecture just to survey things properly, but let me just take two or three minutes along these lines.
a. Suffering as a temporal discipline.
Hebrews 12, for example, quoting Proverbs, says, “Our heavenly Father is committed to chastening all those whom he receives into his family.” He’s committed to doing so precisely because he knows this is a fallen and broken world and that we sure need chastening.
Any wise parent knows that part of being a parent involves discipline. It involves lots of love and sacrifice, but it also involves discipline, doesn’t it? Failure to discipline is actually not a sign of more love; it’s a sign of lack of love, according to the book of Proverbs. He chastens all of us, everyone, whom he receives.
b. Suffering to prepare us for helping others.
Granted, this is already a fallen and broken world, and God is working out his mysterious ways. Those of you who have been bereaved, maybe you can scarcely see through your tears in the moment, but the time will come when you will be peculiarly gifted to help those who themselves are then being bereaved.
c. Suffering as a form of witness.
Shortly after the tsunami went through, I was in Denmark giving some lectures. Such is the state of affairs in the world today that a Canadian Baptist can be asked to address Danish Lutherans on justification, but that’s the confused state of affairs! It turned out that while I was there, there was something on Danish television. My Danish isn’t good enough to understand, but it was translated for me.
It was from a former government minister, himself a devout Christian. (You must understand that Denmark is very secular. I doubt if there are 2 percent that attend church regularly, and only a small percentage of those are believers in any sort of New Testament sense). This former minister of the government was, in fact, a genuine Christian. His son (who was also a Christian and who was training for ministry) and his son’s wife, were, in fact, in the path of the tsunami and were killed.
Because of the prominence of the father, inevitably the media glommed on him. They knew about his Christian heritage so, inevitably, they pummeled him with questions like, “So where’s your God now?” It was brutal. “Do you think that God is a loving God when he can kill your son like that?”
The man answered with unimaginable wisdom. “I miss my son and my daughter-in-law more than I can say, but I am absolutely certain that I will see them again, for Jesus has forgiven their sins, as he has forgiven mine, and prepared a place for us. I look forward to being there with them again.” It wasn’t theologically adept; it was just true and authentic.
“But don’t you blame God for doing this?” “I don’t pretend that I understand it all, but my son and his wife are not the only ones who were killed. I grieve also for all those others who were wiped out. This is a fallen and broken world. It is a hard world. At least, I have the comfort of friends at home who love me, the memory of all that my son means, and the perfect confidence that at the end of the day, Jesus will reign and justice will be seen to be done.”
It was no sort of deep theological analysis. He never mentioned the word compatibilism. And all of Denmark knew what it was to be a Christian. Now that doesn’t mean that the tsunami was a good thing (don’t misunderstand me), but God’s sovereignty in the mystery of providence is so rich and complex as it works out.
You must understand that it brings about judgment. It brings about the finality of things. It shows us, again, that we’re under God’s judgment. We all face death. That brings us to the kinds of concerns that we had yesterday. Yet, at the same time, it displays God’s grace, time and time again.
d. Suffering makes us homesick for heaven.
If you’re a pastor very long, you’ll watch people die in different ways. Somebody wiped out in a motorcycle accident: in the peak of health and, bang, they’re gone. Others with a lingering death that takes months and months, maybe years and years, in withering obscenity. I don’t know which one is harder. The first one is, quite frankly, usually harder, on the survivors. It’s just so sudden. It’s so much to cope with.
The second one has its own ugliness, but it ends up (if you’re dealing with Christians) teaching both the sufferer and the family how good heaven looks. Watch a family when one of them suddenly comes down with cancer and, very often, the first reaction is unbelief or outrage or “I can’t believe this is happening to me” or “Is there any cure?”
Then, when you get to the place when you realize that it’s terminal, at what point do you start saying, “This world is not my home; I’m just a-passing through,” so that even all the suffering can, in some sense … in the strange providential mercy of God in this fallen and broken word in which death is always rampant … teach us that here we have no enduring city.
5. Insights from the centrality of the incarnation and the cross.
This fifth pillar is, in some sense the most important of all, but I’m not going to spend a lot of time on it. This is partly because, once I’ve articulated it, you can already see where it will go.
We do not have a God who has never been tempted as we have. We do not have a God who is merely distant. But in the fullness of time, God gave his Son, born of a virgin. “The Word became flesh and lived for a while among us.” Then not only did he suffer the normal vicissitudes of life, but, ultimately, he suffered the ignominious odium of the cross and all the burden-bearing that was peculiarly his by virtue of the fact that he bore my sins in his own body on the tree.
At the end of World War I, that brutal war that was in some ways more brutal than World War II, the war produced a small handful of brilliant poets: Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Edward Shillito, and a number of others. Edward Shillito wrote a poem called Jesus of the Scars. In it, he pictures the wounds that are around him all the time, and the only God that can make sense to him is a God who also has wounds. He pictures the scene in John 20 when the doors are shut and Jesus appears:
If, when the doors are shut, thou drawest near,
Only reveal those hands, that side of thine;
We know today what wounds are; never fear,
Show us thy Scars, we know the countersign.
The other gods were strong, but thou wast weak;
They rode, but thou didst stumble to a throne;
But to our wounds only God’s wounds speak;
And not a god has wounds, but thou alone.
That’s why, for the first three centuries of the Christian church, Christians spoke, with the most profound irony, of Jesus reigning from the cross. That changes everything because the God of the Bible is not only the God of providence, but he’s also the God who incarnates himself in the person of his Son to bear my sin and my death, such that I enjoy the promise not only of spiritual existence and freedom from guilt, but resurrection life in a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness.
We’re back, now, to seeing how these five pillars actually hang together. This is the answer to the creation and fall of the first pillar. It is the foundation of the second pillar, the basis of our hope for what takes place at the end. It enables us to put up with the mystery of innocent suffering when we see the one who is most innocent most suffering. And we learn to trust the mysteries of providence all the more when the God of this providence is not only distant but one of us.
I have permission to tell this story, or else I wouldn’t tell it. It concerns my daughter. We used to live every third year in Britain. One year, when she was 14 (she turned 15 during the year), we were living in Cambridge. Arrangements were made for her best friend to fly over and join us at Christmas. My daughter is Tiffany; her friend was Melissa. Melissa was a six-foot blonde, an athletic type with energy and pizzazz. The two would get off the school bus, come and raid our fridge, and then go down the street to raid their fridge. They were very close.
So arrangements were made to have Melissa flown out for Christmas. The day before I was to get up very early to drive down to Heathrow to pick up Melissa, we got a phone call from her parents. She had just been diagnosed that very day with leukemia. To make a long story short, despite the best medical help, Melissa started to slide. We flew Tiffany home at Easter to stay with some Christian friends. She went into the hospital every day.
Pretty soon, the nurses just let her be. She was the only one, for 12 to 14 hours a day, who cleaned out the trach tube. She’d go home to the friends that she was staying with and go back the next day for another 12 to 14 hours of cleaning out Melissa’s trach tube. Melissa, at this point, had already lost her hair. She was a bag of bones. Tiff flew back to England and, in June, Melissa died. In July, we flew back to Chicago.
My daughter is the sort who lets it all hang out, so, in some ways, she grieved well. There’s no way she is going to bottle it all up; that’s just not her personality. So we were grateful even for that small mercy. It all came out. She was honest. In some ways, I was proud of how she was handling it.
In September, however, I heard her quietly crying in her room. I tapped on the door and came in. She was quietly sobbing on her bed. I put my arm around her and said, “Come on, tell me about it.” She burst into tears, and she said, “Daddy, God could have saved my best friend and he didn’t. I hate him.”
These are things they don’t prepare you for in seminary. So I told her, “I’m so glad you’ve told me. God knows what you’re thinking in any case, and there’s no point in pretending differently. You might as well be honest about it. I don’t hear you going much further than some of the Psalmists do, or Job himself, pushed to the edge. But before you’re convinced that God doesn’t love you, I beg of you to think of two things.
First, do you want a God who is just like the genie in Aladdin’s lamp? Do you want a God who is absolutely powerful and can do utterly anything, but always at the control of whoever rubs the lamp? Or is the God of the Bible so big that sometimes he’s going to do stuff you won’t understand? Which one is worthy of worship?
Second, before you become convinced that God doesn’t love you, you always have to measure God’s love, not by how well things are or are not going in your own small life, but by the height of the hill outside Jerusalem.
You lost your best friend; God lost his Son. In fact, he didn’t lose him, but he gave him. When everything else seems to vanish away, you have to go back to the cross and understand that there is no more definitive proof, in the entire universe, of the love of God than that old rugged cross. There you’ll find stability, and nowhere else.” I didn’t say anything profound. I merely articulated 1 Peter.
Now let me conclude with three practical conclusions.
1. This approach is not simply a proof-texting approach of a couple of quick verses.
It is a question of worldview formation, how to think through all of reality in the light of all that Scripture says. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so hard to get this across, powerfully and tellingly, to an unbeliever, to somebody with superficial views.
It’s one of the reasons why that former minister in Denmark did so well. He didn’t try and present a whole worldview. In that sort of TV setting, where all you have time for is one-liners, he sort of got to the heart of things at a personal level. That’s all you have time to do sometimes. But if you’re trying to build genuine stability on the long haul in people’s lives, this is what you must do. You must see the big picture.
2. This two-part lecture has focused on the intellectual, the theological, the synthetic (worldview issues), and I think that it is very important for Christians to think about these things.
But in some ways, for most crises, this is not the stuff that you present. There are some people who are so intellectual that, even in the midst of their crises, they’re helped by thinking these things through. There are an awful lot of people, however, who are so blinded by tears in the midst of their grief that this is not what they need, quite frankly.
They need this before it happens. You must understand that this is a prophylactic. This is preparatory medicine. This is the sort of thing that Christians should understand before they fall into the muck, before they’re in the miry bog. Then when they’re in the miry bog, they have the intellectual, theological, biblical, spiritual, and experiential resources so that, in addition to the things that they’re actually suffering, they’re not further suffering from a catastrophic loss of confidence in God.
When people are actually going through it … although as I say, there are some who are helped by this, or some small part of this, as you direct people back to the cross … very often, what they need is a hand cutting the grass, taking care of the kids. They need long, lingering, sustained help.
In our church, not very long ago (about a year ago), we lost a man who was only 46 to brain cancer. He had a lovely wife and three daughters. Several of us just conspired together to make sure that we were going to that house again and again and again. As long as he was able, we would take him out. He had strange bulges on his head and a steel plate that was in; it all looked very ugly.
We’d take him out to small restaurants, care for him, and chat him up as his speech was becoming more slurred and his memory more distant. We made sure he was supplied with things he needed, and then we set up a rotation for cutting the grass, making sure that the jobs were done around the house, and making sure there were rides for the kids.
Then, after he had gone, then you have to make sure that there are ongoing provisions. It is sometimes at that point that the church falls flat, because then the ongoing detailed cares of the bereft family can be overlooked. “Well, he’s gone now, so we’ll get on to the next one.” But sometimes, there’s a year or two or three of transition.
Grief is a funny thing. It can come back and sneak up on you five years later. You think you’re all over it and have thought it all through, and then some strange memory comes back, and you burst into tears in public and look like a twit. How do Christians handle that? I don’t want to give the impression in these lectures that, provided you have all your theology sorted out and figure out the mystery of providence, you won’t have any problem with tears or that that’s all there is to compassion. I don’t want to give that impression for a moment.
3. Christians who get to know God well do not, as a rule, spend a huge amount of time on these issues.
Isn’t that a terrible thing to say? I’ve just undermined everything that I’ve said. Not long ago, I was preaching through Nehemiah. I came to the great confession in Nehemiah 8, and something struck me about it. This is something I should have realized long before; it’s the same in the great confessions in Ezra 9 and elsewhere.
What struck me is that as that all the things that the Israelites had suffered, all that they had endured, all that they had undergone, was not bringing them back to God and saying, “Oh, God, I wish you’d explain that to us. I know we were pretty bad, but, you know, the other nations were even worse. God, the theodicy here is really quite difficult. Would you explain to me the mysteries of providence?”
I know that there are some passages in the Bible that talk about those sorts of things, but when the people of God are right on the edge of reformation and revival, that is simply not how they think. Rather, there is massive corporate contrition. “We have sinned. Our fathers have sinned. We deserve all that you have sent us. Oh, Lord, will you not have mercy upon us?” Isn’t that the case, again and again and again, in Scripture?
Both voices are found in Scripture, but when you are on the edge of reformation and revival, it’s not theodicy that is everybody’s concern. It’s contrition. One of the things that strikes me about contemporary Western evangelicalism is that we are producing scores and scores of books on theodicy (I have written one of them, so I know) and almost nothing on contrition. May God have mercy on us. Let us pray.
We thank you for the resources to think your thoughts after you that you have left in the words of this book. We remember that the night he was betrayed, the Master himself prayed, “Sanctify them through your truth; your word is truth.” So sanctify us, everyone gathered in this room, by your Word of Truth as it bears on these things. For Jesus’ sake, amen.
